Television broadcasting involves sending video from a broadcast facility for distribution to receivers in a broadcast network. Within a media production facility that sends a television broadcast, video and audio signals from multiple sources may be managed by productions switches and then encoded for transport to a distribution network. A long standing problem for media broadcasting is to tune and sync frequency and phase of a decoder at a media device (e.g., a distribution node or a processing node such as a video receiver) to a master media timing source (e.g., a transmitter at the source of the media transport). Propagation delays due to electrical connections, device processing, and conductor impedance of network links contribute to phase offset at downstream media devices. As the evolution of broadcasting progressed from analog to digital domain and across various protocols (e.g., MPEG-2, Internet Protocol (IP), IPTV, Ethernet), various techniques have been developed to manage the frequency and phase sync. Local clock references, such a program clock reference (PCR) time stamp or a presentation time stamp, provide no reference to real time. Other protocols, such as precision time protocol (PTP), provide time stamps infrequently, and are slow to converge on a precise phase lock due to the low refresh rate of the time stamp values. Compounding these potential problems with time stamps is where multiple unique time stamps may need to be applied independently to over a hundred audio and video feeds, each having different clock rates and phases.
As such, an efficient method for synchronizing the frequency and phase of devices in a media network that distributes audio and video data packets, such as for live broadcast television programming is desirable.